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Javier López

Javier López has been a Spanish member of the European Parliament since 2014. He is chair of its delegation to the Euro-Latin American Parliamentary Assembly and a member of the Committee on Environment, Public Health and Food Safety.

Javier López

Europe under quarantine

Javier López 20th March 2020

The coronavirus crisis has exposed the shared vulnerability of Europe’s interdependence. Time to turn that into a strength.

The green agenda—a social and geopolitical tool

Javier López 17th December 2019

The European green agenda is key to saving the planet—but it could also save an enlightenment-based multilateral order from nationalist irrationalism.

Electoral Authoritarianism, Elective Dictatorship

Javier López 12th November 2018

Jair Bolsonaro will be President of Brazil. A homophobic soldier with authoritarian excesses, who has scorned democratic mechanisms and threatened his political rivals, will lead the greatest regional power in Latin America that is now a global giant. In fact, his profile, a caricature of a third-rate dictator, would be comical if it weren’t for […]

Inequality More Than Matters

Javier López 7th December 2017

Inequality is the biggest challenge of our time. It undermines social confidence and reduces support for democratic institutions. It lurks behind the new toxic relationship that western societies have established with their future and explains much of recent resentment-driven electoral phenomena and the surge of identity politics with its disruptive backlash. As for the economic […]

Democracy Without Glue

Javier López 20th July 2017

The aftershocks of the Great Recession are still being felt. The trail of suffering in the shape of unemployment and destruction of wealth has transformed the map-making of the western world, ending up by provoking a real geopolitical recession with an Anglo-American epicentre aka the cradle of global capitalism. Likewise, the coordinates of the political […]

The Geopolitics Of Chaos

Javier López 23rd March 2017

The new world disorder is under way while speculation about what President Trump would do has given way to a spate of executive orders. The cocktail of reactionary withdrawal from previous commitments (Trump + Brexit is imposing a change of guard on international relationships, leaving the northern hemisphere turned upside down. The neoliberal economic and […]

Europe And The Globalization Of Unrest

Javier López 13th December 2016

Donald Trump’s victory has sent the liberal world order into a tailspin. We are not just facing a wake-up call; this wave of authoritarian national populism with shades of protectionism has stormed the castle walls. A racist president, unpredictable and misogynist, who defends a white isolated “America”, is about to take leadership of the first […]

The Decline Of The European Empire

Javier López 14th June 2016

While Europe was engrossed in facing up to the Euro crisis, all around it the greatest refugee crisis since the Second World War was deepening. The management of the Great Recession has impoverished the continent and is polarizing it but the refugee crisis is the first that affects the center and not just the periphery. […]

Europe In Multiple Organ Failure

Javier López 3rd March 2016

The European Project finds itself at its worst point since its creation. First came the disastrous management of The Great Recession and the consequent loss of legitimacy of European institutions. Now, the management of the refugee crisis has overwhelmed Berlin and Brussels and turned the Mediterranean into one of the most deadly borders in the […]

A High Seas Disgrace That Should Shake Us Into Action

Javier López 21st April 2015

Europe cannot afford the shame of doing nothing while thousands of migrants die in the Mediterranean simply seeking a better life. There have been more than 1000 deaths in the past few days alone. What northern Africa is currently going through is the biggest refugee crisis since World War II. If the European institutions do […]

Europe Is Back At Square One

Javier López 24th October 2014

Europe is back at square one. On the verge of a third recession in five years, the relentless tide is even crashing against the insurmountable walls of the German factory powerhouse. Stagnation yet again in the Eurozone – this time accompanied by a certain whiff of Japanese-style deflation. Once more the markets are getting nervous: a volatile […]

ETUI advertisement

The four transitions and the missing one

Europe is at a crossroads, painfully navigating four transitions (green, digital, economic and geopolitical) at once but missing the transformative and ambitious social transition it needs. In other words, if the EU is to withstand the storm, we do not have the luxury of abstaining from reflecting on its social foundations, of which intermittent democratic discontent is only one expression. It is against this background that the ETUI/ETUC publishes its annual flagship publication Benchmarking Working Europe 2023, with the support of more than 70 graphs and a special contribution from two guest editors, Professors Kalypso Nikolaidïs and Albena Azmanova.


DOWNLOAD HERE

Eurofound advertisement

#AskTheExpert webinar—Key ingredients for the future of work: job quality and gender equality

Eurofound’s head of information and communication, Mary McCaughey, its senior research manager, Agnès Parent-Thirion, and research manager, Jorge Cabrita, explore the findings from the recently published European Working Conditions Telephone Survey (EWCTS) in an #AskTheExpert webinar. This survey of more than 70,000 workers in 36 European countries provides a wide-ranging picture of job quality across countries, occupations, sectors and age groups and by gender in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. It confirms persistent gender segregation in sectors, occupations and workplaces, indicating that we are a long way from the goals of equal opportunities for women and men at work and equal access to key decision-making positions in the workplace.


WATCH HERE

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

Let’s end involuntary unemployment!

What is the best way to fight unemployment? We want to know your opinion, to understand better the potential of an EU-wide permanent programme for direct and guaranteed public-service employment.

In collaboration with Our Global Moment, Fondazione Pietro Nenni and other progressive organisations across Europe, we launched an EU-wide survey on the perception of unemployment and publicly funded jobs, exploring ways to bring innovation in public sector-led job creation.


TAKE THE SURVEY HERE

Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

The macroeconomic effects of re-applying the EU fiscal rules

Against the background of the European Commission's reform plans for the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), this policy brief uses the macroeconometric multi-country model NiGEM to simulate the macroeconomic implications of the most relevant reform options from 2024 onwards. Next to a return to the existing and unreformed rules, the most prominent options include an expenditure rule linked to a debt anchor.

Our results for the euro area and its four biggest economies—France, Italy, Germany and Spain—indicate that returning to the rules of the SGP would lead to severe cuts in public spending, particularly if the SGP rules were interpreted as in the past. A more flexible interpretation would only somewhat ease the fiscal-adjustment burden. An expenditure rule along the lines of the European Fiscal Board would, however, not necessarily alleviate that burden in and of itself.

Our simulations show great care must be taken to specify the expenditure rule, such that fiscal consolidation is achieved in a growth-friendly way. Raising the debt ceiling to 90 per cent of gross domestic product and applying less demanding fiscal adjustments, as proposed by the IMK, would go a long way.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ILO advertisement

Global Wage Report 2022-23: The impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power

The International Labour Organization's Global Wage Report is a key reference on wages and wage inequality for the academic community and policy-makers around the world.

This eighth edition of the report, The Impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power, examines the evolution of real wages, giving a unique picture of wage trends globally and by region. The report includes evidence on how wages have evolved through the COVID-19 crisis as well as how the current inflationary context is biting into real wage growth in most regions of the world. The report shows that for the first time in the 21st century real wage growth has fallen to negative values while, at the same time, the gap between real productivity growth and real wage growth continues to widen.

The report analysis the evolution of the real total wage bill from 2019 to 2022 to show how its different components—employment, nominal wages and inflation—have changed during the COVID-19 crisis and, more recently, during the cost-of-living crisis. The decomposition of the total wage bill, and its evolution, is shown for all wage employees and distinguishes between women and men. The report also looks at changes in wage inequality and the gender pay gap to reveal how COVID-19 may have contributed to increasing income inequality in different regions of the world. Together, the empirical evidence in the report becomes the backbone of a policy discussion that could play a key role in a human-centred recovery from the different ongoing crises.


DOWNLOAD HERE

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